Jim Gaffigan Quotes

Acting forces you to ask yourself, 'Can my constitution take a decade of constant rejection?' And after ten years, you either make it or you don't. And the problem is they don't tell you in advance.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

I've always been strong-minded, but I wonder.

Actors are no strangers to self-doubt, fear, and rejection.

I didn't have a problem with rejection, because when you go into an audition, you're rejected already. There are hundreds of other actors. You're behind the eight ball when you go in there.

The hardest thing about acting is all of the other things you have to think about besides performing... Your image, your team, networking - not to mention the mental strength you need to be able to stay unaffected by the rejection that every actor experiences.

I've had a lot of failures as well and rejection. As actor, it's actually mostly rejection but people think it's mostly success because they only see your successes - the films that get made.

Somehow, in many of those near-miss instances, I've managed to fight through and continue. But in all these situations, even when they're apparently going well, I feel I am living on the razor's edge between success and failure, adulation and humiliation - between justifying my existence and revealing my unworthiness to be alive.

Everyone fails. Everyone is constantly failing. It is all part of life, and especially this job of being an actor.

I think most actors . . . We are insecure, in general. I think to be an actor, you need to have an ego, but then, our ego is our worst enemy.

My brain . . . it cannot process failure. It will not process failure. Because if I sit there and have to face myself and tell myself, 'You're a failure' . . . I think that's almost worse than death.

Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good?

I told myself, 'All I want is a normal life'. But was that true? I wasn't so sure. Because there was a part of me that enjoyed hating school, and the drama of not going, the potential consequences whatever they were. I was intrigued by the unknown. I was even slightly thrilled that my mother was such a mess. Had I become addicted to crisis? I traced my finger along the windowsill. 'Want something normal, want something normal, want something normal', I told myself.

She could not trust herself to hope—but without hope, she realized, she had no reason to go on.

I'm an actress so the amount of rejection and commentary you get right to your face is pretty rough.

It's tough, acting. You have to walk two lines of a tightrope. There's the all-consuming fear of failure: I'm about to fall flat on my face. There's that and there's also confidence - you have to be confident in order to try things - and they fight each other all the time.

As an actor, no matter what, you're at the whim of so many other people all the time.

I'm the seagull. No, that's not it. I'm an actress. That's it.

It is when those who are not strong enough have made some moderate amount of progress that they fail and give up.

When my sister decided that she wanted to act, I was so nervous for her. She's doing great, but I have a lot of friends at every level of success as an actor, and we all go through periods of time where they feel like their worth isn't within their own control. That's a horrible feeling for an adult to have.

I don't even want to think of myself as an actor because it's such an insecure place to go.

And I walk out of space Into an overgrown garden of values, And tear up seeming stability And self-comprehension of causes. And your, infinity, textbook I read by myself, without people - Leafless, savage medical book, A problem book of gigantic radicals.

Now if I seem to be afraidTo live the life that I have made in songWell it's just that I've been losing so long.

She believes in love and romance. She believes her life is one day going to be transformed into something wonderful and exciting. She has hopes and fears and worries, just like anyone. Sometimes she feels frightened. Sometimes she feels unloved. Sometimes she feels she will never gain approval from those people who are most important to her. But she’s brave and good-hearted and faces her life head-on.

It's hard to maintain a sense of dignity in an audition. I have done so many auditions where I've put it out there and have been met with that kind of blank stare - "Great! Thanks! OK! Great work! Thanks for coming in!" At the door I'm thinking, 'What the hell am I doing with my life?'